EMERGENCY ON PLANET EARTH

A MASSIVE slab of ice as big as the Isle of Wight has snapped off a glacier in Greenland – sparking fresh global warming fears.

The 100-square-mile ice cube is the size of nearly 36,000 football pitches and as tall as the Empire State Building.

It is the biggest chunk to have broken off the ­Petermann glacier in nearly 50 years and ­happened more than 600 miles south of the North Pole.

Satellite pictures – taken on ­Thursday by NASA – revealed the chilling break.

The ice island could again join to a piece of land, break into smaller ­pieces or even move south and cause chaos on shipping routes.

The huge chunk, which is about 600 ft thick, is drifting in the Nares Strait between Greenland and Canada.

Shocked experts at the University of Delaware said there was enough ice to supply all running water in the US for four months.
Prof Andreas Muenchow said: ­“Nobody can claim this was caused by ­global warming.

“On the other hand ­nobody can claim that it wasn’t.”

He added it was difficult to be sure what had caused the event because data on the sea water around the glacier had only started to be collected seven years ago.

But scientists say the first six months of 2010 had the hottest average worldwide temperatures since records began.

Images showed the Petermann ­Glacier has lost about a quarter of its 70km long (43 mile) floating ice shelf.

Thousands of icebergs break off Greenland’s glaciers annually but they are rarely as big as the latest island.

One the size of Luxembourg broke off in the Antarctic earlier this year.

A Friends of the Earth spokeswoman said it was too early to comment on whether the latest incident had been caused by global warming.

She added: “We are facing huge ­challenges regarding climate change and it’s essential that we find out what happened and act accordingly